We review why executive compensation contracts are often structured the way they are, analyze risk incentives stemming from various pay schemes, and examine the tendency of the banking and finance industry toward excessive risk-taking. Studying the typical executive pay structures in banking and...

Remarks at the 2010 Institute of International Finance Annual Membership Meeting, Washington, D.C.

This paper investigates the effectiveness of one of the Fed’s unconventional monetary policy tools, the term auction facility (TAF). At issue is whether the TAF reduced the spread between LIBOR rates and equivalent-term Treasury rates by reducing the liquidity premium embedded in LIBOR rates....

Presented by Eric S. Rosengren, President and Chief Executive Officer, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, for the Conference on New Challenges for Operational Risk Measurement and Management, Boston, Massachusetts, May 14, 2008

We adopt a systemic risk indicator measured by the price of insurance against systemic financial distress and assess individual banks' marginal contributions to the systemic risk. The methodology is applied using publicly available data to the 19 bank holding companies covered by the U.S....

Indiana University, Bloomington, Ind., Oct. 2, 2008

In 2008, U.S. regulators banned the short-selling of financial stocks, fearing that the practice was helping to drive the steep drop in stock prices during the crisis. However, a new look at the effects of such restrictions challenges the notion that short sales exacerbate market downturns in...

Securities loans collateralized by cash are by far the most popular form of securities-lending transaction. But when the cash collateral associated with these transactions is actively reinvested by a lender’s agent, potential risks emerge. This study argues that the standard compensation...

Agents with standard, time-separable preferences do not care about the temporal distribution of risk. This is a strong assumption. For example, it seems plausible that a consumer may find persistent shocks to consumption less desirable than uncorrelated fluctuations. Such a consumer is said to...